Contemporary dance companies are notoriously short lived so to be able to celebrate Black Grace’s 30th anniversary season is a particularly welcome occasion.  From small beginnings in 1995, with an initial company of just 10 men, Neil Ieremia has built a company that is now established as a fixture of the New Zealand dance scene with loyal local audiences and a regular international touring schedule.  Indeed, such is the demand for the company’s appearances elsewhere, opportunities to see them perform in this country can seem all too rare.

Rather than choosing to select works from the last 30 years, which many of Black Grace’s followers would surely have relished, Ieremia has decided to create a new, forward-looking work with If Ever There Was a Time.  One senses that, having survived as a dance maker for this long, Ieremia now feels that he can challenge established beliefs and cultural practices with a confidence denied to his younger self.

If Ever There Was a Time begins with a tightly stacked group of dancers placed on the central axis of the stage.  Above them is a billowing white form, part cloudscape, part barrage balloon, from which a large glowing moon descends to preside over the stage as the work evolves.  Is this white canopy the cloud cover of islands in the Pacific, or is it something more threatening?  Outstretched arms make this opening tableau resemble the cross central to the Christian faith, but the piled-up bodies also evoke the opening of Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet, Les Noces, first staged in 1923, another work that challenges the rigid social structures of a traditional society.  Ieremia’s targets are not just organised religion but the conflict that is justified in its name, as well as the dangers of unexamined assumptions and beliefs and more generally, the threats that exist all around us in the contemporary world.  The fact that the dancers’ eyes are masked during this initial phase further suggests that although we may look, we don’t always see.

The work is set to a thunderous soundscape of Ieremia’s devising that isn’t just be heard but also felt.  The bickering of societal and religious disputes are conveyed through the frenetic gestures of the protagonists, finally descending into open conflict.  Religious wars are symbolised by the appearance of a Crusader flag (the medieval religious zealots, not the rugby team) and a placard bearing the date 1096, the start of the First Crusade.  The clear implication is that little has changed in almost a thousand years.

The rituals of everyday life are also held up to scrutiny; a wedding with both bride and groom’s faces covered by shrouds that are manipulated by controlling figures who follow in their wake, suggests that we often behave as we are expected to do without thinking about the implications of our actions.  The innocence of childhood is captured by a sequence where a girl enters the stage skipping, her flashing blue rope carving though the air as she moves across the stage, seemingly oblivious to the threat of the crouching figures who gather behind her.  As the rhythm of the skipping intensifies so too does the menace of these threatening figures, until it seems that the skipper must surely be overwhelmed; the sequence ends with her deftly stepping into the wings and the threat evaporates.

Ieremia describes himself as an optimist and If Ever There Was a Time, does, in fact, end on a positive note; the glowering moon rises in the sky, the mood lightens and Samoa Sila Sila, performed, by Ieremia and Isitola Alesana, suggests that in a troubled world there are still islands of peace.

After the intensity of If Ever There Was a Time, Paul Taylor’s Esplanade provides a complete contrast.  The choice of this work by the celebrated American choreographer might seem rather curious programming for a dance company based in the South Pacific, but there is impeccable logic behind its inclusion in this celebratory programme.  As a young dancer Ieremia performed with the Douglas Wright Dance Company, and Wright in turn, had performed with the Paul Taylor Dance Company.  Taylor himself had worked with Martha Graham, so there is a whole genealogy of modern dance present in the choice of Esplanade, one of Taylor’s most celebrated works.

On the surface, Esplanade, seems like a work of guileless simplicity, set to two radiant violin concertos by J S Bach, his E major Concerto for solo violin and the last two movements of his Double Violin Concerto. This provides Taylor with a fast-slow-fast-slow-fast structure that gives the work its underlying symmetry. The women wear clean-lined frocks, the men t-shirts and pants, creating the impression that these are ordinary people going about their daily lives. They walk, they run, they sidle and leap in patterns of ever evolving complexity, both physical and emotional.  This is everyday life raised to the realm of art.  Taylor’s use of Bach’s Double Concerto inevitably invites comparison with another celebrated dancework set to this music, George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, a staple of the New York City Ballet’s repertoire at the time Esplanade was made.  The formal, abstract sculpture of Balanchine’s work seems almost inevitable, making Taylor’s challenge to the great choreographer both daring and provocative.  Taylor is, in effect, saying, you don’t need to use this elaborate formal movement vocabulary to respond to Bach; Bach is for everybody and everyday movements will do just as well.  Such a challenge to a revered dance authority must surely have appealed to Ieremia.

At the risk of revealing just how old I am, I had the good fortune to see Esplanade performed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company in New York during the northern summer of 1977 at a time when the work was still new to local audiences rather than the classic it has since become.  The New York audience gave the work a rapturous reception just as that in the Theatre Royal did last night. Inevitably one wants to ask how the performance differed; how did a work set on a group of elite dancers in New York city sit on dancers shaped by a very different time and place? The answer is almost impossible to frame; any more than one can define the difference between sparkling neon light on New York pavements and shimmering sunshine on South Pacific sands. It is a measure of a great work of art that it is susceptible to multiple interpretations, and the dancers of Black Grace reveal the vitality and poetry, the energy and grace that lies at the heart of the work. Through their bodies it emerged as fresh and as relevant as it did 48 years ago, surely the measure of a masterpiece.

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